Writer's Toolkit

Colours

Until 1704, the rainbow had five colours. Then Sir Isaac Newton added orange and indigo because he liked the mystical properties of the number seven.

The first colour ever used in art was red. Ochre was used in cave art 75,000 years ago.

Orange takes its name from the fruit which was first cultivated in China 4,500 years ago. They were exported via the Silk Road and went northwest to begin with. The Sanskrit word for orange tree is ‘narrangah’. This became the root word for many languages as the fruit became more popular - ‘narang’ in Farsi, ‘naranj’ in Arabic and ‘naranja’ in Spanish. Before the fruit arrived in England, the English word for the colour was ‘geoluread’ (yellow-red) but in the 16th century ‘orange’ took over. In some languages they have a separate word for the colour and the fruit – in Afrikaans the colour is ‘oranje’ but the fruit is ‘lemeon.’

Yellow has associations with cowardice and since the 8th century it has been the colour of anti-Semitism. The Caliph of Medina ordered Jews and Christians to wear yellow badges because it was the colour of nonbelievers. Edward I of England required Jews to wear yellow patches and Nazi Germany yellow stars. It is the colour of defiance in the form of the yellow ribbon which started with the women’s suffrage movement in Kansas in 1867. Yellow was chosen because the state flower was the sunflower.

Green can give images of the natural world but also malign connotations like envy, jealousy, inexperience, illness and poison. A dye called ‘Scheele’s green’ was invented in 1775 and contained large doses of arsenic. The Ancient Greeks, Chinese, Japanese and Hebrews didn’t have a word for blue. They thought of it as a version of green. The colour consistently comes first in countries where colour preference has been surveyed.

In 1856 William Henry Perkin, an 18 year old chemistry student, was told to do an experiment using coal tar to try to find a cure for malaria. He failed but was intrigued by what he had created (a combination of coal aniline and chromic acid). He dipped a cloth in and it came out purple and held the colour. He patented the dye called ‘mauveine’. Until then, purple cloth was prohibitively expensive – the ancients needed to crush 12,000 murex sea snails to get one gram of Tyrian purple.

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